Artists & Works

Sylvia Plimack Mangold's landscapes hark back to the work of 19th century painters, but also, through the use of trompe l'oeile elements and arbitrary framing, impose a cool, contemporary context on the subject matter. The artist has been creating landscapes in this vein since 1982, often using as her subject the Hudson River Valley where she lives.

Mangold's use of illusionistically-painted masking tape appears in this drawing as well as in many of her paintings. The use of tape suggests pictures that are taped to the wall—romantic scenes longed for by the shut-in urbanite. The landscapes are reminiscent of the 19th century forbears, the painted-on tape reminds us of the industrial present.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Publishers Weekly, 10/17/94
"These unsettling pictures draw the viewer into an intimate, eerie space. Some images are flamed by illusionary "masking tape," painted to look like actual tape, thereby expanding the artist's commentary on the different planes of reality and illusion. Her explorations of color in moody, nocturnal landscapes are tinged with romantic associations. Her recent, highly gestural pictures of towering trees, made in her outdoor studio in upstate New York, evoke a private sanctuary of healing and peace ."

Christine Temin, Boston Globe, 11/9/95
"Between the floors and the big landscapes is a long series of works dominated by masking tape that looks real even at a distance of a couple of inches. You see people walking right up to these paintings, examining them microscopically. Besides being prime examples of the centuries-old tradition of illusionism, they address the materials of art itself, a quite contemporary concern. A comic sensibility sneaks into some of these process pieces; one is "Exact and Diminishing," a painting with two rulers. One looks like a real ruler glued onto the left edge of the canvas. (You do have to keep reminding yourself that it's just paint.) The other gets smaller as it ascends, as if receding into space. The two versions of "reality" in a single painting could be metaphors for all sorts of dualities. They're also a visual tickle. The landscapes started small: The first ones look like pretty pictures cut out of magazines and stuck onto a studio wall with masking tape, and while the tape stays perfectly illusionistic, the landscapes are loose and brushy. These works are sometimes dominated by a single color and tied to a season: white for winter, pungent green for spring, ripe gold for summer. The white works are reminiscent of Whistler, the same painter who springs to mind when you look at Plimack Mangold's inky nocturnes. Again, though, that masking tape pulls the pictures into the present."

Robert Kushner, Art in America, 12/95
"Realists don't know what to do with Mangold's intellectual clarity and scrappy nonprettiness. Hard-core abstractionists can't embrace the subject matter. The gloom-and-doom contingent find the life-affirming qualities of her work a little uncomfortable. This leaves Mangold in an artistic arena of her own creation, where rules are defined and broken according to her uncompromising demands on herself and the profound integrity of her paintings. "